


St. Clair and Fleming Do the Blitz

by strange_Selkie



Category: The Covert Captain - Jeannelle M Ferreira
Genre: AU: WWII/The Blitz, F/F, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-12 07:33:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18441947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_Selkie/pseuds/strange_Selkie
Summary: A Writing Recess/Post-Canonical Fictional Exercise by the Author.Her Majesty's 7th Hussars really were on the North African front during WWII, and I wondered, does anyone remember the epilogue of Mary Gentle's Ash books? It's like that. Fleming, Sherbourne, and Linton are still cavalry, just the tank kind. Harriet has joined the WRNS. St. Clair doesn't want to talk about what they're doing and refers you to the Official Secrets Act of 1911.





	1. Somewhere in London, December 1941

“Please stop hurting that potato,” sighed Rose. “I love you more than life, but I am tired of peeling the peels.”

St. Clair held it out to her, because the angle was wrong for lobbing it into the pot, and hooked an arm round her waist when she came near. Rose had savvy green eyes, deep-dimpled cheeks, and curves enough so an austerity skirt dazzled mortals; St. Clair got a garter-button under their thumb, the soft roundness of her thigh against their palm, before Rose snorted and stepped lightly on their foot.

“Never mind trying that before supper, Professor.” She shook free, not without smiling at them. “Shame you’re on duty tonight, you might have had your chance after washing-up.”

“Duty, did you mean larking about in the blackout with a bucket?”

“Nothing wrong with the fire watch.” Rose had said it before.

“I’m not as old a fool as I look! They ought to let me do something.”

“You fought in the last one!”

“Not on record.” St. Clair shook their head. “And it’s no use volunteering for France. Theo would only send me out to the Somme to look for his leg.”

“You will not, God forbid, volunteer for France. It’s enough danger here! What is it -- what is it really? St. Clair.”

“Some boys of Moshe’s acquaintance may have mentioned his stepfather was a conchie.”

“Then he could mention how many bobbies I’m still baking for, after you went nine rounds on Cable Street.” Rose shrugged. “Let me be glad you’re too old for a call-up. Last year I had two children; this year, five! How could I manage without you?

“Hm.”

“You could wear your uniform, _ziskeyt_.”

“I will, if I’m put to it, die for the commonwealth, but I will not do it dressed as a third-rate manservant,” they scowled, though they sat at the scuffed-up table in a greying old shirt and argyle jumper under lecture-hall tweeds. Idle, their paring knife tapped the surface in time to Glenn Miller blaring upstairs. “And if I hear that foxtrot one more time!”

“Let them have it. We can’t give them much of a celebration. We can’t, we can’t give them their parents --” St. Clair’s wife, who had not flinched to see the East End bombed down around them, who knew how short the coal was running and how few coupons were on the book, suddenly drew her apron up and bit it to stifle a sob.

“Raisel, hush.” The kitchen was cramped enough St. Clair nearly reached her before her tears fell; they kissed the covered crown of her head, the wisps of her hair made rough by her scarf’s edge, her temple and her cheek.

“I worry so much,” she said, against St. Clair’s throat. “How we’ll keep them safe. What to tell them. All this time, never hearing a word! Sophie’s parents, Friedl and Peter’s parents, our Arie in Palestine…”

“Do you suppose the Seventh is out there building sand-castles? D’you think Nora will let that man anywhere near him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything! You think I have time to know what I think? _You_ feel like an old fool,” she trailed off, wet-faced. She had never, to St. Clair, looked a moment older than she had when St. Clair lifted her wedding veil, but she stood just a little apart from them now and something of her seemed to flicker and dim.

St. Clair took both Rose’s hands, still damp from scrubbing, stained with beetroot; set one at their shoulder and clasped the other, and drew her in close at the hip. Music still drifted down through the study floor; Rose, taken all by surprise, let St. Clair lead. Slow-slow, quick-quick, neat as the Ritz, though the kitchen lino crackled beneath their feet.

“What are you doing? I don’t even know this one!”

“You do, you do.” St. Clair met her nervous laughter with a kiss. “If the kids are wearing the gramophone out, the old fools may as well dance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ziskeyt is Yiddish for 'sweetie,' more or less.


	2. Somewhere in Egypt, December 1941

“I hate Egypt.” Sherbourne stood in his socks and braces, trying with a scrap of mechanic’s towel to coax the sand from his hair. He spat, and then looked up apologetically. Sand flies held no regard for tents. “I sodding loathe Egypt.”

“Well, never mind,” Fleming comforted. “We may be in Libya.”

Linton came in, grubby up to the cheekbones though the hot water he carried was clean. He balanced three mugs in his firing hand, and sipped from the nearest. “Lord, I miss tea.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Hot water with a hint of diesel fume.”

“I miss Harry,” said Fleming, though no one had asked. “It must be an age since --”

“Been a week. She sent pic’n’mix.” Sherbourne rummaged at the foot of his cot. “At least, it’s her writing on the parcel. Not your address -- Steeple Claydon, never heard of such a place.”

“Strictly speaking, is this my pic’n’mix?”

“Strictly speaking, I’ve eaten the rhubarb custards.”

“I’m going to skin you. I’m going to render you and clean my gun with the tallow. Was there a letter?”

“No. Ow!”

Quick and cool, Linton stepped between them. He put one hand on Eleanor’s shoulder, one palm on Sherbourne’s chest; it was too hot a night to touch another human body, but he stood quite still, waiting, and for a moment there was no sound but the creak of all their boots on the sand.

“No letter,” he agreed. “You know they take their time on Cairo station.”

“You know I wouldn’t,” Sherbourne protested. “I never would. It’ll show up in February, and us still stuck sand-fighting.”

“Consult the wireless, will you, dear?” Linton cuffed Fleming’s shoulder, gently.  “Spare us talking like this when we’ve all got plans for morning.”

“Who’s got plans?” She crouched to fiddle the dial, so she need not face him; it stuck, from the crack down the front of the case or from the sand, and the programme was slow to fade in.

“You may’ve missed it, but we’ve been invited to a battle. Fraser loads, I shoot, you drive?”  

“And I’m for garnish, I guess,” Linton said. “All right then, Nora?”

“Yes. No. Fuck it. Just.  I want to go home and see Harry.”

Sudden as light in a house at home, the Andrews sisters sang _Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, oh!_ Sherbourne looked at Linton -- _John Linton_ , in London; _Johnny_ , never -- and his sun-scoured mouth shifted up in a tired smile; their fingertips just brushed, all caution, even in front of her, even now, and Eleanor ached.

She half-turned away from them, because that was what you did, when two people were in love and every space they owned was small, every bed belonged to the regiment, no moment had been truly private for years; she scuffed her boot on the packed-sand floor, so they might hear her leaving them, and ducked through the tent flap, out into the heat and the dark.

“Nora,” Sherbourne said after her, but he dared not call her aloud.

Eleanor sat with her back against a tent-rope, with her Enfield out beside her and her cover left behind indoors. Her handkerchief, too, and she had learned not to dry her eyes with dust-caked khaki drill; she looked up, instead, until her sight cleared a little.

There were so many stars. Maybe they saw the same ones at home; St. Clair would know what a tin chauffeur in the Mobile Farce did not. Harry would know.

Eleanor did not ask the photograph she kept in her right leg pocket. She only thought, briefly, sharply, of asking. _Desert-rat crazy_ , she assessed. They call us that, now. _With all my heart, Harry, I’m sorry I’ve lost my mind._

She drew her knee to her chest -- harder to do, now, week after month of crouching in a sardine tin starting to tell -- and dug out the photo, wrapped in Aertex from a torn-off shirtsleeve and a bit of an officer’s raincoat, to keep out the wet.

Second Officer Lady Harriet Sherbourne-Fleming, the midnight blue of Wrens’ kit and the midnight black of her hair worn down by sand and time to one darkness, smiled up at Nora. She would have to ask for a new photograph, when she was in Cairo next and a letter might get through.

Harriet could get anything through -- a tin of fruit or a telegram, though the boys flinched at the sight of one. She had war work, something on the quiet; _safe in the countryside, safe in England, safe_. Eleanor thought the words until they stopped making sense, until her throat and her eyes stopped hurting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steeple Claydon is a small place about 20 minutes outside of a manor in Milton Keynes. It has a steeple. 
> 
> The Mobile Farce was actually what the tank cavalry called themselves. You can't get funnier than actual people in wartime, so I didn't try.


	3. Somewhere in Buckinghamshire, December 1941

There were boots sounding the floorboards by Harriet’s bed. Familiar, not frightening; someone fumbling not to wake her. She turned, to see the window or the clock, and the bedsprings dipped under a weight Harriet knew by heart.

“Nora,” she whispered, half rising. “It’s the middle --”

Eleanor’s arms were around her, then, holding on close and fierce. It was too dark, until Harriet bumped the night-light, to see her clearly; but the shape and weight of her, the scent of clean sweat and gun oil overlaid with the faint dust of drill-dress cloth, were all Nora’s, and her voice, rough and muffled, was almost lost beside Harriet’s ear.

“Missed you.”

“I’m dreaming. You’re not, you can’t be real.”

She took Harriet’s ink-marked hand in her callused one, and kissed her knuckles; put the pad of Harriet’s thumb to her mouth, and bit.

“ _Ow_ ,” Harriet said; Eleanor said “Ink!” and pulled a face no artillery captain would make in a dream.

“Beast.”

“Husband, I thought. Or wife, or something.” Her voice was hoarse almost to breaking, but there was a laugh in it; the laugh faded to a prayer, a promise, breathed over Harriet’s forehead in the moment before a kiss. Quick, cautious brushes of Eleanor’s lips at first, landing across her cheekbone, pressed to her earlobe when Eleanor nuzzled at Harriet’s hair. Then Harriet course-corrected her, two fingers along Nora’s jawline in the dark, and they kissed for the first time in a year.

It was a mess, half-biting and frantic and everything. Harriet talked -- Harriet always did talk, when Eleanor had her like this, nonsense on the current of their breathing -- _Eleanor Charlotte_ , and _love you_ , and _oh, my God_. Nora answered her with wordless, raw-voiced tenderness, her hands and her mouth always seeking, never still. Harriet was not crying, would not cry.

Sand lay in the creases of Eleanor’s sleeves, when Harriet held to them; every stripe and leaf hung ragged, every buckle and medal cold. She must have come straight from the airfield to Harriet’s billet; her gloves and her cover were missing, and she was paper-pale. Harriet leant into her, to feel the rise and fall of her chest, to steady with her own strength the slight shaking in Eleanor’s shoulders.

“Happy Christmas. God, I dreamed of having you home.”

“Harry,” she said, and “I’m sorry,” low and earnest as if their time apart was her fault, and Harriet could not bear it.

She shoved at khaki and combat webbing, just to run a palm or a fingertip over Eleanor’s skin, and seemed never to succeed; Eleanor pushed back, as she never had, until Harriet was pinned under her weight. She tore and pulled at every threadbare thing Harriet wore, until buttons scattered like pearls in the sheets and Harriet nearly sobbed. _Please, closer, please_. The gentlest touch would have run fire through her veins, after so long, and Eleanor was not gentle now. She knew where to bite and where to comfort, where to stroke and where to bruise; she was quiet and demanding and precise. She had Harriet wrecked without saying a word, without touching the skin she had exposed; then her hand came down at last on Harriet’s bare hip, and Harriet --

Harry yelped. “Dearest, you’re freezing.”

She sat back, a little, and offered a rueful grin. “Bloody cold here at night, love.”

“What…?”

Eleanor came down close, again, and followed Harriet’s pulse from throat to clavicle with kisses. Her fingers, driven through Harriet’s hair, grew warm, but the tip of her nose was a shock still: Harriet huffed and laughed and nudged her up, away.

Something dropped forward from her half-buttoned shirt, so close in the dim light that Harriet had to blink. Eleanor’s field tags -- one field tag, and a frayed-off cord; the red disc had been cut.

“Nora!” She shouted to carry across a desert, a sea, and held on hard. Cloth and skin and wind-rough hair slid through Harriet’s fingers like sand. _Hold me fast and fear me not_ , one of Eleanor’s endless songs, and she would, she did, she tried; but the light was silver at the frost-laced window, and Harriet was waking just the same. 


	4. Chapter 4

The room’s sun and shadows were latticed by splinter tape, and _Hanukkah Sameach_ had been swirled over the glass in dish-soap and rough Hebrew, but it was still the brightest place in the narrow house, and the warmest. In an hour the study would be full of sound: Moshe revising aloud, Friedl singing with the gramophone, Peter and Sophie in a quarrel and Lily querulous at being out of it. The Meccano sets were bent and sticky, the pack of cards was short two kings and no minor person was allowed under St. Clair’s desk, all worth more noise; but just for now it was silent. St. Clair closed the door into stillness, and felt a moment’s utter gratitude to be alone.

Curled in a corner of the oldest sofa, Rose was asleep.

There was no question of waking her -- _when else will she sleep, and where, the public shelter_? St. Clair took off their jacket and set it round her shoulders, so the collar might warm the nape of Rose’s neck where her scarf left it bare. They looked down at her just a moment, because she was striking even with a year’s shadows under her eyes, guileless and sweet in sleep as she could not be, awake; and then they meant to back away.  

“Hello, lovely.” She stretched, a little, and shivered when St. Clair’s jacket slipped aside. “What’s wanting?”

“Just you.”

“St. Clair.” Rose looked heavenward, infinitely tested, but went into their arms despite the banter. “Oh! Don’t, I’ll squash you.”

“I’m not a lemon, thank you.”

“Gosh, though, a lemon might be nice!” She laughed,half-settled in their lap,  though she never quite relaxed when her weight rested on St. Clair. It was the one matter for which they would have pitched her late, first fellow off a handy bridge -- _fine father, fine provider, raised no hand to her, absolute chancrous dimwit_ \-- but things were improving; Rose put her head back on their shoulder, now,  and sighed. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I ought never have sat down for a second. Ten things I meant to queue for, and I fall asleep!”

“What ten things? We have children to do the queueing. We’ve borrowed more, if you recall.”

“Have we? Is that what’s the matter with the washing?” She frowned up at them. “Can’t send them to the shops for their own gifts, though -- such ones as we’ll manage. I know, I know there’s money. There’s nothing for it to buy!”

“I thought a trouser suit for Moshe, for the synagogue. He’s too young, but it’s only for shul,” St. Clair reasoned. “Maybe you have it all right, in the gallery, but the men’s bit ain’t half cold.”

“You’ll spoil him.You’ve ordered it, haven’t you?”

“Might have.”

“So long as it’s black -- please tell me it’s a nice sensible black?”

“I think Lily would take a jigsaw of the blackout, if the box had all the pieces in,” St. Clair ignored her. “And Sophie’s out of face powder; Peter wants some grim book about fighter planes. Friedl ought to have something new for the gramophone -- _please_ \-- and enough chocolate creams for the lot of them. Sorted!”

“For this, you have Doctor in your name,” Rose scoffed, not at all displeased.

“What would you like?”

“Seems silly to have Hanukkah in the blackout. And you needn’t -- you know it’s just for the children.”

“Just the same,” St. Clair insisted, and at last she sighed.

“I would like forty-five minutes alone with you, in our bed, and I would like to spend them incapable of thought.”

“Hm. Not an hour?”

“ _Gevalt_ , they’ll empty the pantry in an hour. They’ll dig for UXB in the allotment.” She shook her head, and when St. Clair ran a hand under her cardigan she seemed not to mind. “What about you?”

“Your hair, down.”

Rose only lifted an eyebrow.

“What? I’ve not seen your hair since September.”

She swatted St. Clair away a moment, and then she untied her scarf. “Just _ask_. That’s yours already.”

Rose’s hair was bright-gold as old angels and far too long for fashion, all in loose curls when St. Clair stroked through it; she covered it, always, unless the two of them were alone, and alone was not a word for a war. _Because I’m married,_ she’d said to them, just when she had come out of black clothes for their wedding, and _Yes, but you’re married to an utter heathen_ had never budged her, but here and now St. Clair had everything they wished and Rose was kissing them, hard.

They would have been content just with this -- Rose at rest with them, a little warmth and quiet, time enough to kiss like teenagers on the sofa. But Rose took hold of their wrist, quick as anything, and bent at a strange slant: to read their watch-face, St. Clair realized.

“Time,” she said, “How much time before…?”

Into the veil of her hair they murmured, “Twenty minutes.” Suddenly she was no longer pressed against them; she moved and for once seemed not to doubt her own grace. Her fingers ran across St. Clair’s trousered knees, nudging a little, tugging a bit, and it took them a bewildered, blinking moment to keep up.    

Rose knelt on the floor in front of them. She fit easily there, as if such things happened every day; her hands rested, strong and safe, on St. Clair’s upper thighs. She might have taken anything from them, without asking. She looked straight up at them and asked.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, hell.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hanukkah and Christmas really did intersect in 1941.


	5. Chapter 5

“ _Would_ you turn this tractor,” Sherbourne said, acid as the sweat stinging all their eyes, “so I stand a chance of hitting something at which I shoot?”

“Commander, thump the gunner!”

“Busy! Make the loader thump him.”

“Got no loader,” Eleanor answered, the louder to make it hurt less.

“Gunny can thump himself, then. There’s a war on!”

The gunner was ignoring them both, and singing. “ _I want high explo-sives, I want high ex-plo-sives! Bring ‘em to me by the next convoy.  I want high explosives, I want high ex-plo-sives! That’s the thing I really should enjoy_.”

“Some lads in the Fifth fitted their Tilly up for the six-pound gun. You think if I do ours for him, he’d stop singing? All _right_ , Band Wagon!”

“I think it gives him courage,” Eleanor said, wincing. Sherbourne had not run out of words, and he was rhyming them as he emptied his clips; but they were mostly unfit for company. “His sister can stay in tune, I want you to know.”

“Shit, _shit_ mother of all hells _right_ stick, _now_ please, _Nora_.” Linton dropped down into cover, bumping Sherbourne, and Sherry caught his forehead on the periscope’s edge and splashed them all three with blood; Eleanor’s hand followed the order, and the rest of her shifted round to look.

There was smoke filtering in, from whatever they had not hit -- whatever John had seen that she had not -- and the air tasted more metallic than it ought, but their tracks were still moving and no one was dead. The commander’s hatch was open to a bright, flat, hot sky.

“They’re not even mining the desert fair and square any more,” complained Sherbourne. “They’re leaving ordnance like Christmas parcels.”

 “Rotten surprise, a parcel like that.” She laughed, as much as she dared to laugh with Sherry bleeding above her in the gunner’s basket, but Commander Linton seemed not to want the sound. He was rigid in the shoulders; his teeth showed and his hands were shaking.

“I barely saw it in time. Might never’ve seen it, ‘cept the light was on our side. I’m sorry, chaps, I’m sorry --”

“You did see it,” Sherbourne cut him off. “We swerved, and you shot ten holes in it, and it went boom. We can all go back to having a war now. John. It’s all right.”

Linton turned to Eleanor, and whistled. “It was pretty maneuvering. You ought to drive the Grand Prix for England, you lucky fuck.”

“You kiss your gunner with that mouth!”

“Well. Not when he looks like that.”

Sherbourne’s hair was soaked and stuck across his forehead with blood; he was ash pale down to his stubble and his dark eyes were stricken wide.

“Oh, go on,” said Nora. “I’ll turn my back.”

“You’re not funny,” he sputtered. “What if you'd under-steered? Harry would have killed me!”

Everything on earth was funny, after the close call they had had. Fumes and heat and a hundred small hurts made them all dizzy fools; they were still moving forward in as level a line as a tank could run, because Eleanor could drive the Matilda in her dreams, but Sherbourne’s legs dangled down from the turret like a schoolboy’s, and Commander Linton had not returned to his lookout.

The kiss saved them, she thought -- she must have thought it a hundred thousand times, after. In the half heartbeat between the thump of the anti-tank shell and the screaming shear of the turret armor as it gave way, their heads were down; the blast took their balance, sending them down on top of Eleanor, but gunner and commander kept their limbs.

“Get off!” She had not signed up, this hitch, to drive anything on fire; and maybe Linton was shrapnel-stunned and Sherry bleeding to buggery, but Eleanor was not going to suffocate under them. She was pinned so close to the ground, she felt it shaking. With the percussion came heat, even through the Matilda’s armor, and it was growing inconvenient to breathe.  “I _won’t_ die in a sardine-tin, I won’t die without seeing my wife, get off and get out!”   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sherbourne's filk of 'I Wanna Banana' is not strictly in period, as that song came out in 1942. 
> 
> A Tilly is short for a Matilda, e.g. an Infantry Tank Mark II. There were many aftermarket alterations made to these in pursuit of a better boom.


	6. Chapter 6

“ _Mameh, Tateleh_! Aunt Harriet’s here!”

Moshe’s voice, piping clear even through closed doors, sent Rose to the sofa’s far corner quickly as a shove.

“Lady Harry? Did she write?”

“If she had, I’d be busy -- and not with you!” She reached to unmuddle St. Clair’s necktie, her touch drawing the sting from her words. “Put yourself together! Don’t go out looking like Ivor Novello with a plait!”

“Ivor Novello, at my age?” St. Clair grinned. “You think so?”

Rose’s hands flew in her hair, twisting and tucking, and she blushed when her eye caught St. Clair’s. “Go away. Get the door. Be pretty somewhere else.”

St. Clair put their hands in their trouser pockets and gave a full turn, still grinning back at her across the study threshold. The front hall was stuffed with seven souls’ gas-mask cases and overshoes and umbrellas, winter-dim even before they’d nailed up the blackout, and always damp, but Moshe had not shown Harriet into the parlour or, thank small gods, the study. He was still at her elbow, polite, a little pale, and looked up at St. Clair wide-eyed.

“Run downstairs, _meyn likhtel_ , and put the kettle on.”

Harriet said nothing. She looked cold and crumpled, as anyone might from traveling these days; her officer’s hat was only just over on one side, her satchel half open, her tie entirely gone.

There was an envelope sticking up from her coat pocket, bent as if she had taken it out and replaced it a dozen times in the train to London. It had torn across the corner, but in the awful light Priority could still be read.

“Which one of them,” St. Clair managed, not even lifting it to a question.

 

The tea leaves had had a third steeping before Harriet found her voice. “I’m sorry to crowd in on you, Lady Lowborough.”

Rose, who answered to _Missus St. Clair_ in shul, queues, and shelter, caught herself on her darning needle; the three refugee children looked up as if electric current had run round the room. The waterspout toe of FitzGeorge, Lord Lowborough’s boot nudged hard at Harriet’s ankle.

“Don’t fuss,” said Rose. “That you should be alone on your leave, at this season!” She made no mention, in front of the family, what sort of leave it might be.

“Have my and Arie’s room, Aunt Harriet. For as long as the leave is.” Moshe shrugged. He could not, if Harriet recalled, be more than ten; not in trousers yet. He was serious and steady as a young soldier.

The last time they had been together -- all of them -- was in this room, Harriet remembered: two years ago, nearly, to see St. Clair’s elder stepson off to Palestine. A lad of only sixteen, principal heir to the tag-end of a Raj fortune, wanted most to cross half the earth and break his back in the desert; but no one, that night, had cried.

She dared not cry now, in the FitzGeorges’ cluttered parlour, though the afternoon was fading down bruise-colored and cold. Out of politeness, no one had even switched on the BBC in the next room; the five children shuffled their feet on the carpet, or whispered, and never mentioned hunger or boredom.

“Moshe, dear, take my pass and take this; see what can be got in time for tea.” Harriet handed him her ration book, folded over to the sugar coupons; his mouth dropped open wide as his eyes. “If they won’t register me on a three-day hitch, think of a half-pound of sugar and gin up some tears. I find that’s effective.”

“ _Tateleh_ , may I take it?”

“He’ll clean you out for the week, Lady Harry.”

“Certainly he may, and the tea ration too. One ought to indulge one’s nephews.Go on.”

“ _Has not leave to wear plain clothes_ ,” Moshe read from the typed pass, and whistled. “I never knew the army were just as hard on girls.”

St. Clair stifled a sharp cough behind their hand, and not for the first time Harriet wondered what manner of person in girl’s clothes they had been, before the Great War. She knew they had been into France and out of it, though they must have been shockingly young, and their brother -- quite high up now in the Ministry of War -- had come home a limb lacking, a bit off his plumb, and made over his duties to St. Clair, who was reputed to be quite a bit off theirs.

They seemed steady enough, balanced on the arm of their wife’s chair beside Harriet’s, precise and aloof as a sharp-suited cat. St. Clair had the pale patrician sort of face Harriet had seen above club collars at garden parties all her life, and everything below the collar was tailored to the last inch, so that one was never certain, exactly. Harriet was dead sure they were he on the General List, but that was as far as that went; they might be a major or a major-general, in ten pounds’ winter tweeds and boots not worth sixpence. That they were fathoms more than oh, Nora’s old friend from the service, any right-minded person might tell just by looking. Their eyes were dark, intent, and rather cold, unless they were speaking to their wife, and even their smile gave the idea they had run the numbers before the house cut the cards.

A year after Harriet’s own marriage, near enough the Silver Jubilee to have borrowed the spoons for the wedding breakfast, St. Clair had eloped, with Sherry as witness and Nora as heist driver. It was not the queerest thing about them, Harriet supposed, that their bride was Jewish and a shopkeeper’s widow, with children. She was sturdy and round-figured, with splendid green eyes and a quick warmth to match St. Clair’s reserve, and she was dressed anyhow, with a scarf tucked over all her hair and only a plain wedding band; she sat and mended a small worsted stocking as if she did not wear some carats of the Lowborough chaplet -- a rose or two, for her name’s sake -- on a chain near her heart.

The stocking’s owner was stretched on the carpet under the parlour chaise. Lily FitzGeorge was reading, though she looked too young to read, and bundled into a red wool kaftan trimmed four inches deep in sable; until she turned a page, her hands were hidden in the fur cuffs. It was too long for her, too warm even for a room with so little coal, and it was not an English coat; it seemed a small tsarevna had fallen into Bevis Marks with only a secondhand copy of _National Velvet_. A very well-looked-after child must have worn the coat, decades ago, on a cold voyage —over mountains, or across a long winter sea.

Harriet looked at St. Clair, not foreign, nor English, never quite one thing or another -- a study, like Nora, in which clothes made what sort of man, when that had nothing to do with the person in them -- and knew better than she had why the FitzGeorges, whose tranquil shabby house barely held the family, had put up hundreds of pounds for three children to make a sea journey alone.

“That’s a lovely coat,” Harriet said, to the underside of the chaise and the beaten-down cover of the book.

“Was Daddy’s,” Lily answered. “Now it’s mine.”

St. Clair reached down and caught her by the ankle. “Customary to look at grown people who speak to you.”

“No! Reading! No!”

“All right, wash up for tea.”

“ _Tateh_ , I don’t want my tea. I want it to be Hanukkah. I want to do dreidels.”

“I’m afraid I don’t care what you want, my Lily-my-heart. Hanukkah starts tomorrow, and tea in twenty minutes, and people whose hands are not washed will be too late for jam. Get moving, chaps,” they added, and scooped Lily up from the rug. She keeled in a boneless back-bend over St. Clair’s arm and hung there, making a world-weary sound in her throat.

“Lady Harry, did you mention the Zoo wants another python?”

“Oh, I thought they needed an eel.”

“Ah. We’ll have to send this one over straight away. No eel pies in this street.”

“ _Mameh_ , save me!”

“No.” Rose put away her work-basket, grinning. “I never touched _treyf_ in my life!” But she took her daughter by the shoulders and righted her in St. Clair’s grasp, with a critiquing touch at the parting of her fair hair; the small girl in the princess’s coat was suddenly eye to eye with Harriet.

“Where’s Uncle Nate? You never came here before without Uncle Nate.”

“Raisel, will you --” St. Clair set Lily on her feet; Rose said “ _Sha, blumeleh_ ,” at the same time.

When Harriet’s stomach had stopped turning round nothing but tea and nerves, when she could see and breathe again, someone’s gingham handkerchief was wrapped damply through her fingers and she was alone with St. Clair.

Somehow they held the telegram, though Harriet might swear she felt its weight still in her pocket. They made no remark, idiotic or sympathetic, only read the lines over once more, from _Regret report_ to _missing Sidi Barrani presumed killed_ , and returned it to her.

“It isn’t the worst. If I have hope of anybody, it’s Nora. She won’t panic; she’ll cope with most things. More than you think. And she’s not in the sticks.”

“Isn’t she? I don’t even know where those places are.”

“Egypt.”

“Yes, thanks!”

“One place.” St. Clair met her temper without blinking. “I don’t have it on a map -- not one that’s up to date these thousand years -- and I haven’t been since the Twenties; I expect they were having a go at the Libyan border.”

“You’ve been there! Whatever for? Nora wrote -- and they didn’t black it out --  it was only a whole lot of nothing.”

“Botany,” they replied, nonsensical.

“I thought,” Harriet broke off, miserably. “I thought you must know someone on Cairo station. Someone who might know what really happened.”

“Me, no.”

“Then your brother --!” She worked at the braid on one sleeve until its stitches creaked, trying to fit her next words to a thing always scrupulously unspoken. “If she -- if she’s hurt, and not -- dead, she can’t be left in a field hospital. She’ll be found out. The regiment will know.”

“I suspect the regiment do know, and don’t care. She’s good at her job; always has been; she brings her men back. And please don’t ask me again to involve my brother. Theo’s useless outside of -- outside his particular purview,” St. Clair stopped her. “Triply useless anywhere there’s sand. Do you more good to contemplate a miracle.”

“I don’t want a miracle. I know one doesn’t get miracles in the real world. I only want news.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moshe, who remembers his father, refers to St. Clair as Tateleh, 'little father,' but Lily, who can't remember him, just calls them Tateh, 'daddy.' Yiddish diminutives are great for shades of meaning! 
> 
> Meyn likhtel: my little (but not my littlest!) light. 
> 
> Treyf: not kosher, in this case, an eel. Or a human, for that matter. 
> 
> Blumeleh: Little flower. 
> 
> Botany: this is a Bad Classicist Joke. See also: silphium.


End file.
